Crucial lessons from US Democratic primaries

We are often given to benchmarking. The current outbreak of coronavirus is certainly affecting this area of our practice. But we seldom stop to quantify the impact of these benchmarking trips on our practices. 

If there is something to learn from these practices and a time to learn, then it is from the ongoing process of nomination for the Democratic Party candidate to run against US President Donald Trump in the November elections.

All our leaders nursing interest in running in the 2022 elections should be paying keen attention.

The field started with so many candidates that they could hardly fit on a stage and debates were held on different days to allow everybody to be on stage. They started to whittle them down through opinion polls.

Anybody who, according to the polls, did not have sufficient support was not invited to debates and eventually dropped out.

Again, after the debates, anybody whose score in the opinion polls did not rise to the minimum threshold was dropped.

Then the nomination process properly started and since then, candidates have been dropping off one after the other.

More importantly, the candidates who are dropping off are throwing their weight behind the candidate that most represent their ideals and considered to have the best chance to beat Trump. 

So far, none of these candidates have thrown their weight behind Trump. The situation here in Kenya would have been very different.

Hardly would any candidate been dropping off the contest whatever the opinion poll numbers show. 

But secondly, hardly would any candidate been throwing their weight behind the person who would have been the eventual winner.

What we would be treated to now would have been tantrums of how elections have been rigged in favour of one person or the other; how the electoral college would have been trying to manipulate the systems, not to get the best candidate, but to make the candidate that they favour most win whether that candidate was popular with the public or not.

The party system would have been in place now, with the party headquarters dishing out nomination certificates to influential or “moneyed” persons.

Then each candidate would have vowed to run till the end. If they did not get the nomination certificate from one party, then they would run to the next party or form their own party.

Granted, our system is rigged. There is often no honesty in the system. But further, our candidates do not have strong ideological beliefs.

The candidates in the US Democratic Party are identified with their ideological positions – those holding positions left to the centre of market economy like Bernie Sanders, and those more centrally positioned like Joe Biden.

Our calculation would of course have been different. The ridding factor would have been who comes from the largest community irrespective of the popularity of the person’s ideas towards improving people’s living standards.

There are lessons and reasons to benchmark with the US nomination process. But it should not stop there. It must include drawing lessons to apply to our political system as well.

The first is the discipline at the party headquarters to let the electorate speak in whittling down the candidates.

Party officials must be independent, not favouring one candidate and doing everything possible to make that candidate win the nominations.

This requires integrity. Secondly, the candidates should believe in something and not be driven by the size of their clan.

Thirdly, there should be a willingness to accept that the best candidate representing those ideals and the best chance to beat the opponent carry the day rather than imposing a candidate.

Maybe we are learning something. In the last LSK elections the candidates who lost gracefully accepted and supported the winner.

It would be great if the same practice was transferred to the national elections. —The writer is Dean, School of Communications, Daystar University